Focus on ELT Journal Special Issue, 4(1), 2022 ISSN: 2687-5381  Corresponding Author: vgokce@metu.edu.tr Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to Focus on ELT Journal. The Impact of Teacher E-Feedback on Students’ Writing: A Waste of Time or a Road to Success? Gökçe Erkan Instructor, Middle East Technical University, Turkey, vgokce@metu.edu.tr APA Citation: Erkan, G. (2022). The impact of teacher e-feedback on students’ writing: A waste of time or a road to success? Focus on ELT Journal, 4(1), 46-59. https://doi.org/10.14744/felt.2022.4.1.4 ABSTRACT Academic writing is one of the writing skills that has been taught traditionally via face-to-face physical classroom settings. However, with the new advances in educational technologies, online teaching and learning have entered the realms of educational institutions and they are not nowadays considered a foreign aspect. Especially in the last two years of great home-confinements due to the Covid-19 pandemic, teaching and learning in the online world have turned into an inescapable solution. The implementation of online teaching and learning has brought the teachers to a new avenue of teaching writing especially in the aspect of giving feedback to students’ writing. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of electronic feedback (e-feedback) provided by instructors on their students’ writing in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) class. The Learning Management System (LMS) was used by the students to submit their writings, and the instructors provided online feedback using the system. The results mainly show that the students benefited from receiving different forms of feedback using the system and the instructors found freedom to provide as much feedback as provided for different purposes. The results of this study indicate that e-feedback practices should be implemented more in language classes and teachers must receive training to improve their knowledge and skills in the practice to be able to use different feedback tools and resources to achieve different ends on their students. Keywords teacher e-feedback, corrective feedback, audio feedback, oral discussions Article History Received : 03.11.2021 Revised : 17.01.2022 Accepted : 11.02.2022 Published : 04.04.2022 Type Research Article Introduction Due to the increasing popularity of English, many tertiary level institutions have chosen English as the medium of instruction to prepare their graduates better for life after graduation. The students in these universities study English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to improve their language skills to be able to survive in their academic life. Among all the language skills, writing as a productive skill is crucial for a university student to develop appropriate writing skills to gain academic success; therefore, EAP teachers try to find ways to equip students with appropriate writing abilities. Despite its being time-consuming and requiring a lot of effort, feedback is still one of the most fundamental aspects of any writing classroom for any writing teacher. With the new technologies integrated into the fields of language teaching and learning, the way mailto:vgokce@metu.edu.tr https://doi.org/10.14744/felt.2022.4.1.4 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4248-9257 Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 47 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com teachers can give feedback has changed. This study is research conducted in an English- medium university during the Covid-19 pandemic when all the educational institutions have been confined, and all teaching and learning have had to be switched to the online mode. In the university, all undergraduate students take EAP courses to help them about language use in their departmental studies. In the first freshman course, the students basically deal with all language skills with a basic focus on academic reading. The second EAP course, in which the research was conducted, the aim is at writing. During the course, while the students are asked to produce written materials based on the teachers’ instruction, the instructors are highly involved in providing constructive feedback for developmental purposes. Teacher feedback was always carried out through face-to-face but with the pandemic, it has been carried onto the online world as well. In the research, teachers’ e-feedback practices have been analyzed to search for the perceptions of both the students and the teachers regarding e-feedback in small-scale research. The study employed a mixed-method approach, and the data were collected through both quantitative and qualitative data collection tools recruiting teachers and students. The results shed light on how e-feedback should be used in language classes and what the institutions should be able to equip their instructors with the required skills to help them implement these tools in their classes. Feedback in the English language writing classes Traditional way of providing feedback Traditionally, writing was considered as a controlled mechanical activity following a product approach. The students were given a limited amount of time to complete a piece of writing within predetermined word limits. However, using this approach, the students did not have a chance to see their weaknesses and work on immediate improvements. However, over the years, writing has started to be regarded as a recursive and complex activity requiring care and effort both on the part of the student and the teacher. Therefore, teachers have given importance to providing feedback and begun to follow a process approach through which they have the chance to interfere with students’ writing and guide them with their feedback to make them better writers. Gagné (1985) and Gagné et al. (1992) perceive the importance of feedback for one’s learning and define feedback as an “external learning condition” to improve the effectiveness of learning. Such teacher interferences have been frequently valued and students have become familiar to make better use of teacher feedback. Giving written feedback to student writing has been a common practice for many years and many studies have already been conducted to search for the effectiveness of teacher feedback (Alexeeva, 2012; Atieya, 2012; Cohen & Cavalcanti, 1990; Hedgcock & Lefkowitz, 1994; Lee, 2008; Long, 1992; Zacharias, 2007). While there have been studies that point to the usefulness of corrective feedback to improve the language level of the papers (Fathman & Whalley, 1990; Ferris, 1995, 1997; Lalende, 1982), there have also been others which have been carried out about when, how and by whom the feedback should be provided (Enginarlar, 1993; Ferris, 2002; Lalende, 1982; Zamel, 1985). Instructors have tried to be guiding the students with their ways of giving feedback. They have sometimes written a lot Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 48 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com of comments and used error-codes to facilitate the students in their revisions. However, while teachers may have spent time and effort identifying student errors using codes, they may have been overestimating their students’ capacity to interpret marking codes. Lee (1997) interprets one of these difficulties as teachers’ “using a wider range of metalinguistic terms than students could understand”, which may have confused students more in the short term and impeded their learning in the long run (p. 471). The research in the area of providing teacher feedback has been invaluable and contributed a lot to the area of language writing, but unfortunately, there is no clear consensus about whose feedback or what type of feedback is better. One subtle result of many studies is that feedback is valued by both instructors and students (Leki, 1991). An analysis of how teachers’ and students’ perception of feedback differs or resembles may be useful for both teachers and students to understand each other better, which may lead to more fruitful writing sessions for both parties involved. Hamp-Lyons (2001) advices having a group of teachers who can envision the whole educational context and base their decisions and preferences based on the students’ needs and preferences so that the feedback will mean more for the teachers and will be more constructive for the students. Şeker and Dinçer (2014) in their study also revealed that “there should be a dynamic interaction between the teacher and learners to communicate the needs and the expectations of both parties” (p. 74). Once instructors are clear about what their students expect from them in terms of written feedback, they may adjust their instruction and can have more effective commenting practices, which may lead to more effective learning on part of the learners. With this purpose in mind, a study was conducted in all the academic writing classes in the English-medium university where the present study was also carried out (Vanlı, 2012). The study still followed a pen-and-paper type of assignment submission following the process approach to writing. When asked at the end of the study in 2012, both students and teachers shared their views regarding teacher feedback. Some of the main results of the study were as follows:  Both instructors and students accept that teachers play a key role in improving a student’s writing ability.  The students value teacher feedback.  The students would like their mistakes to be explained by their instructors.  The students wanted their written feedback to be accompanied by oral feedback. The results of Vanlı’s study had personal development benefits for individual instructors but basically contributed to the whole department for teacher professional development purposes. No matter how beneficial the results might have seemed though, it might have been hard for instructors to realize some results such as providing oral feedback together with written feedback due to high number of students and tight schedules. Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 49 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com Contemporary ways of giving feedback The practice of giving feedback is not a new concept and is still used a lot in language teaching but only the ways of providing feedback have changed with the advances in technology. Feedback is structurally grounded on Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory. In his theory, Vygotsky views feedback critical and labels it as ‘scaffolding’ for students. In the sociocultural theory, instructional scaffolding provides the ground for expert-novice interaction. The student and the teacher are constantly negotiating meaning through exchanging information. With the teacher’s guidance, the learners can recognize several issues and their errors in their writings. Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994) report scaffolding to be offered when needed and removed immediately when the student can perform the task. Therefore, the instructor is there to help as a facilitator, but this support is withdrawn when the need for that lessens or disappears. Many recent studies conducted by AbuSeileek and Abualsha’r (2014), Ene and Upton (2014), Henderson, Ryan and Phillips (2019), Lunt & Curran (2010), Chang et al. (2017) have all emphasized the need for e-feedback due to its effectiveness in all schools at different levels. Although the e-feedback was uttered as a possibility in these studies, the COVID-19 pandemic led to this new form of feedback as a necessity or a must in the last two years. Providing e-feedback on student tasks via various electronic devices has particularly become popular among language institutions in universities as well (Ene & Upton, 2014; Hyland & Hyland, 2006; Saeed & Al Qunayeer, 2020). While e-feedback could be used in the form of corrective feedback using computer-mediated tools, various technological tools could be used to provide technology-supported feedback. In a study conducted by Ab Hamid and Romly (2020), teachers’ perceptions towards teaching writing online and giving feedback to online writing assignments have been investigated. It was found out that online learning saves time and provides more freedom. As the setting was not limited to the classroom, the students used other options such as email, social media or online conferencing to interactively communicate with their instructors. In another study carried out by AbuSa’aleek and Shariq (2021), instructors also expressed positive impressions on providing e-feedback through interactive modes. They mostly mentioned that the integration of technology in the education system had broadened the way instructors provide e-feedback to their students. A wide range of new ways of developing and providing language learners with e- feedback are available and with the use of these tools often, several studies have been conducted to learn about the effectiveness of them. Google-Docs was suggested to serve as an effective channel for instructor-learner and learner-learner interactions (Alharbi, 2019; Neumann & Kopcha, 2019; Saeed & Al Qunayeer, 2020). Some other programs have also been studied recently. Blackboard LMS by Ai (2017) and Basabrin (2019); Wiki and Facebook by Demirbilek (2015); blogs by Arslan (2013), Dippold (2009) and Yakut and Aydın (2015); WhatsApp by Susanti and Tarmuji (2016); track changes by AbuSeileek and Abualsha’r (2014) mainly reported positive results. In general, e-feedback has been found to be more time-efficient and promoting quality (Henderson & Phillips, 2015). Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 50 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com Using such various platforms, instructors are not only limited to their handwriting or track changes in their feedback. Audio feedback has been proven to be commonly favored by both instructors and students as it is more detailed, supportive and personalized compared to written feedback. Via recording audio, instructors could deliver e-feedback to their students’ tasks on global issues rather than local concerns “since the audio mode explains macro-level issues more freely compared with written comments” (Cavanaugh & Song, 2014, p. 127). Methodology This study presents the findings of a semester-long investigation of five teachers’ e-feedback on the written assignments of a group of undergraduates and the responses of these students on their teachers’ feedback. The study aimed at following the research questions: 1. What are the teachers’ perceptions regarding teacher e-feedback? 2. What are the students’ perceptions regarding teacher e-feedback? 3. What were the challenges students experienced regarding teacher e-feedback? The study was conducted with a mixed-method design which followed a sequential chronological framework according to Creswell's (2013) types of mixed-method research. The quantitative data were collected through a self-developed survey with mostly Likert type questions from the students. The survey questions were discussed with two other instructors offering the same course, and the questions were tailored according to some feedback. The survey included 10 Likert type items. The last item in the questionnaire was an open-ended response type asking students to provide detailed explanations regarding teacher e-feedback. The questionnaire was administered anonymously and all the participants were ensured that the results would be used for research purposes only and the participation to fill in the questionnaire was voluntary for this purpose. The participants were also informed that the results would be shared if the participants would like to know about the details. To learn about teachers’ perceptions of providing e-feedback, semi-structured interviews were held with five instructors of the writing course. The interviews were recorded upon consent of the instructors and transcribed. The data were thematically-coded by using Miles and Huberman’s (1994) technique. The researcher asked the help of another instructor who was involved with the focus of the study when there were doubts about which code the content fell under. Data Collection The Department of Modern Languages (DML) teach EAP courses to undergraduate students who successfully pass the proficiency exam. In the semester, the department offers EAP courses to the students and in the writing components of the courses follows a process approach to writing. All the instructors in the department ask the students to write their drafts in class after some lead-in activities. The instructors read the student papers and give feedback on the first drafts. Students receive their drafts back and revise their drafts by Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 51 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com responding to teacher feedback. When the next draft is revised and it is finalized, students submit their final drafts online. Instructors check revisions and grade the second drafts. The participants of the survey were students in 6 different classes whose instructors resorted to the LMS of the university to accept student submissions and give feedback on the system. The course where this study was administered was offered by 40 instructors. The teachers had different methods for giving feedback for the essays. For this study, only the instructors and their students who used the LMS were purposefully approached as participants for standardization. These instructors followed the same pattern, both verbal and aural feedback, while giving feedback. The other instructors who used mailing, social media platforms or only video-conferencing were excluded as they chose only written feedback. The quantitative data were collected from the online survey prepared on Google forms and was administered in the spring semester of 2019-2020 academic year in 6 classes to around 160 students in the DML. The questionnaire was on a voluntary basis so the exact number of questionnaires filled in was 96. The students were from 45 different departments enrolled in the same classes. The last item in the questionnaire was an open-ended question providing details about the e-feedback process. This last item provided the qualitative data part from the students. The qualitative data were gathered from the five instructors of the writing classes that the survey was administered in. All the instructors had more than 15 years of teaching experience and had made use of e-feedback of the LMS rigorously in their classes. Analysis The self-developed survey was composed of 10 Likert type questions asking the students’ perceptions of teacher e-feedback and one open-ended item to give participants the floor to express their feelings, if they have any, regarding the same practice. The questionnaire items were prepared by the researcher, and then feedback was received from two instructors offering the course. Some of the questions were refined based on the instructors’ views. The final version of the questionnaire was administered to the participants on Google forms. Students also provided responses at the end of the survey as an explanation for the 1 open- ended item about teacher e-feedback. At the end of the semester, the five instructors of the writing classes who all used the Turnitin and the LMS of the university while giving feedback were engaged in semi- structured interviews with the researcher. The interviewer recorded the interviews which were all held on video conferencing tools. Below are the semi-structured interview questions that helped gather more in-depth data: ● What tools did you use for providing e-feedback for the students’ pieces of writing? ● What did you find to be effective about giving e-feedback? ● What did you find to be challenging about giving e-feedback? ● What do you think would have worked better? Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 52 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com As the students were considered proficient in the course based on their proficiency exam grades and as they conducted all the interactions in the course in English, all interviews were held in English. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed through coding by using thematic analysis using Miles and Huberman’s (1994) technique. Some of the themes that emerged out of transcriptions included teacher e-feedback to be effective and guiding, time- consuming but never waste of time. Results Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data collected by the survey, and the data obtained from the survey can be seen in Table 1 in the form of mean scores and standard deviations. Table 1. Survey questions on teacher e-feedback Likert-type Items M SD Mode 1. I received useful corrections from my teacher via grammar check. 3.5 1.3 4 2. I found teacher audio feedback useful. 4.1 1.4 4 3. I had difficulty in understanding teacher audio feedback. 3.8 1.4 4 4. I found written teacher feedback useful. 4.1 1.6 4 5. I had difficulty in understanding written teacher feedback. 3.6 1.7 4 6. We had online meetings with my teacher on my paper. 3.8 1.6 4 7. I found online meetings useful before revising my draft. 4.1 1.2 4 8. I felt lost while revising my draft. 3.1 1.6 3 9. I felt demotivated when I checked all my feedback. 3.2 1.7 3 10. I would prefer face-to-face feedback from my teacher. 3.6 1.5 3 In the survey administered, most of the students had positive comments regarding teacher e- feedback. For all the responses regarding teacher corrections or comments, the students showed positive criticisms. According to the descriptive analysis of the statistical data, 56% of the students perceived receiving corrective feedback to be positive while 18.7% found it to be neutral. Regarding aural feedback, the students were satisfied with the feedback (62.7%), but they stated having difficulty in understanding teacher commentary (59.7%). Similarly, for written e-feedback, the students replied that they found it to be useful (62.3%), making sense of the comment seemed a bit problematic (54.6%). This result was also supported by the students’ comments written for the open-ended item where they mainly stated that written feedback helped, but there had been times when the teacher’s written comment sometimes sounded confusing or hard to understand. When students could not figure out how to deal with the feedback, they reported sending an email asking for clarification. The teacher sometimes invited the student(s) to an online meeting for providing more explanations or more detailed feedback. While the majority of the responses in the open-ended item confirmed the students’ expressions in Table 1, some students used very remarkable phrases, which highlight some important points about online meetings (all student comments are included as written by the students without any change). Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 53 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com Participant 5 said, “I had lots of misunderstandings because I did not understand all comments but when I asked for an online meeting, the teacher explained everything. I felt comfortable then”. Participant 11 also stated, “online meetings helped like face-to-face meetings. I will not be able to correct some mistakes without my teacher’s comments.” Based on students’ feedback, it can be concluded that students basically feel comfortable if they are given a chance for an online meeting. In the interviews, they usually stated valueing genuine conversations and they would like to be involved in interactive moments where they can ask questions and expect some clarifications. Even when listening to teacher commentary on audio recording, students feel relaxed for hearing their instructor talking to them. Participant 8 said, “audio feedback was great to hear the teacher as if talking to you”. Participant 11 added, “I felt comfortable in audio feedback as I was not facing the teacher. In front of the teacher, I feel bad”. Students generally see audio feedback to be more detailed instruction and commentary, which makes it relatively easy for students to understand. Written teacher feedback may lead to miscommunications or lack of communication. However, including audio comments together with written comments enabled students to make more sense and just one voice comment may be more enlightening sometimes due to its explanatory nature. As time is also limited both for students and teachers, audio feedback created the dialogic conversation between the teacher and the students in a virtual world, which made the real interaction with the instructor less necessary. In the interviews with the teachers, it was found out that the instructors were basically satisfied with the feedback they have provided and they felt convinced in having to spend so much time for their students when they appreciate the value the teacher put into their writings. Teacher 1 reported, “some students really carefully care about what you have written or said and would like to learn about the details or what they can do while revising. Such a moment is rewarding for a language teacher.” Teacher 4 also emphasized, “their saying, ‘Teacher, you wrote more than me’ is precious when you can tell that they want to respond to all the feedback”. The instructors also perceive the LMS as a system used with various different formats for providing feedback. Such a platform enables the teachers to make use of controlled corrective grammar checks, written, and audio feedback options. Teachers may also use online meetings on top of all these types of feedback when such a need is found to be necessary. Teacher 3 said, “e-feedback provides the freedom to make use of a variety of resources available on the LMS” while Teacher 2 mentioned, “I try to adjust my feedback based on my students’ needs and weaknesses.” However, together with common advantages of e-feedback, some challenges have also been stated. One of the complaints that was repeated frequently in the interviews was the low Internet bandwidth and the problems associated with it. Instructors also mentioned Internet connection as impeding students’ understanding. As face-to-face interaction is limited, students have difficulty when they cannot get the message sent by the teacher. Some participants in the study also mentioned not being able to follow and act according to the teacher feedback due to lack of internet connections. Participant 23 said, “especially when the feedback was audio-recorded, it would be hard to get the gist of the message”. Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 54 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com Discussion Although quite a number of studies have been conducted on teacher feedback, whether feedback on students’ writing is effective remains an important discussion in applied linguistics. Feedback has been considered as the central aspect of L2 writing (Hyland & Hyland, 2006), learners expect to receive as much feedback as possible and teachers feel the need to offer it (Bitchener & Ferris, 2012; Guénette, 2007). With the new advancements in educational technologies, new tools and ways of providing feedback in new settings have evolved. It is possible today that teachers use the electronic world both in synchronous and asynchronous contexts to guide their students in their writings. The provision of feedback via electronic forms is no longer unusual in the language classrooms (Elola & Oskoz, 2017) as especially asynchronous forms of providing feedback is time-saving and more effective on the part of the teachers. E-feedback has gained more attention in recent years as the institutions have started to place their classes on the platform to follow registrations and gradebooks. With the help of such a system, students have had the opportunity to submit their papers electronically through the LMS, which enables teachers to provide feedback using these classrooms. It is always challenging for teachers of writing to mark sheer volumes of papers. When teacher feedback is attached such an educational value, feedback turns out to be of high importance. Students especially ask for more prose type of comments rather than simple and short phrase or sentences to draw students’ attention on some issues. An adequate amount of feedback will be giveaways for students helping them to learn and improve on their current competencies. As teachers expect to provide their learners with more than one aspect on their writing, helping students to reflect on task requirements and focus on all aspects of writing will pave the way for task fulfillment. When instructors perceive feedback not as a ‘proofreading’ session but as a ‘teachable moment’, which will help the students learn, learners will be gained with life- learning skills. When time is limited or when face-to-face class time is a hope, technology- based solutions may enable teacher feedback in a professional way. In such a way, technology-embedded learning experience may turn feedback sessions into interactive teachable moments. While, for example, asynchronous options may be used for track changes on electronic drafts for improving surface level weaknesses, audio recordings may be used to give detailed feedback on content and organization using various social media platforms or learning management systems. There may be other benefits as well. As mentioned by Ab Hamid and Romly (2020), online learning enables teachers to display information faster apart from saving time. Being able to access the Internet creates teachers with the opportunity to provide feedback at various times and places. Teacher 6 mentioned the “time-efficient” and “faster” positivity of the online feedback and approved of online feedback more for reaching the students. In addition, when possible, visual interaction can be done via online conferencing where learners will have the time to ask questions and clarifications. AbuSa’aleek and Shariq (2021) emphasize that feedback must be given in conversational interaction where both the instructor and the student must be actively involved. In such a way, learners will become Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 55 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com active respondents to feedback rather than mere receivers of it. E-feedback or e-conferences lead to these mutual purposes. Writing teachers give feedback to the students with the aim to see the students to become independent and critical learners. The Internet, for this purpose, provides an effective medium of interaction to higher education students. It increases interactive communication by question/response to be received any time and feedback to be given anytime (Ab Hamid & Romly, 2020). It is now possible to address the students’ request for both audio and written feedback using educational technologies, which has implications for teacher training programs as prospective teachers of English need to be equipped with such skills to cater for the needs of their students better. Conclusion In any language classroom, students’ main audience is always the teacher; therefore, the teacher is seen as the main resource for receiving feedback. Although there have been a lot of studies on the effect of peer feedback on students, students still would like to see teachers’ comments or hear their teacher’s voice while receiving feedback. Teachers have done their best to be able to help their students in the actual classrooms through organizing office hours as face-to-face environment is good for expressing explanations in detail. With the online classes and home-confinements, these physical meetings have had to be postponed. The teachers resorted to online feedback by making use of email, corrective grammar checks, audio files but none of these have been enough to supplement the face-to-face meetings as students look for positive emotional support. While teachers used the tools of LMS to provide language related comments, they still tried to hold online meetings for detailed talk. These meetings may have been in the form of groups or individual sessions but it has been mentioned in the open-ended item of the questionnaire that students found online meetings “useful” making them more “self-conscious” about their mistakes. Teachers perceive teacher feedback and precious for students as this feedback is tailored to students’ needs and weaknesses. However, though written feedback takes a lot of time to put in the form of a written document, students need to be pushed to engage with this feedback in the best way possible. This encouragement usually comes in verbal exchanges so online meetings or if possible, face-to-face meetings may help the teachers to create a combination of feedback resources to enhance the writing process in the target language. Teacher feedback is important to be taken seriously and it is well-integrated in all pre-service teacher training programs; however, e-feedback has also turned out to be a must in the contemporary world. Though some teachers have not preferred to learn about electronic tools for providing feedback, it is inevitable in confinement times. Therefore, teacher training, both in pre-service and in-service periods, should be integrated as professional development sessions to equip all the teachers with the necessary skills to provide e-feedback. Such programs will familiarize teachers with many forms and types of tools to incorporate their feedback and will make the teacher digitally-mediated instructors. This study contributes to existing research by reinforcing the importance of feedback in any language classroom but emphasizes the necessity of e-feedback in language classes. In e-feedback, instructors should raise their awareness regarding the multimodal nature of e- Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 56 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com feedback and address both local and global issues equally. Global issues are essential rather than local issues but severe local issues cannot be ignored (Alharbi, 2019; Cavanaugh & Song, 2014; Saeed & Al Qunayeer, 2020). In order to tackle with local issues corrective grammar check or some automatic tools can be used or shown to the students to guide them in this help but e-feedback directed to global issues should also be underlined as such feedback will tend to generate more interaction (Saeed & Al Qunayeer, 2020). Rather than using directive statements, asking questions or changing the talk into a dialogical interaction by using expressions or praises may require the learners to react to the feedback, which creates teacher-student interaction online. These virtual dialogic exchanges can also be evaluated more if they have a voice, which can occur by using audio recordings. Audio feedback is efficient, practical, and more detailed than written feedback (Lunt & Curran, 2010). By using intonation and giving more details, teachers may find another way out to reach the students in the best way possible. However, the audio could also be enriched by holding face-to-face or online meetings which will help the students interpret and negotiate teacher feedback by creating interaction. When learners can comprehend the intent of teacher-feedback, they can subsequently use it in the right way while revising their writing (Carless et al. 2011; Guasch et al. 2019). The limitation of this study was that the data were collected at the end of the pandemic period to provide constructive feedback for the following semesters in the department. Therefore, the research was carried out in a hectic time period so the data collection and analysis part lacked some procedural issues that need to be carried out. However, to keep objectivity, the instructor received support from the other instructors to get feedback for the questionnaire or to get help for interview data analysis. It is highly advised that if a similar study is to be conducted in the future, the study will be organized in a limited amount of time in a planned way. The data will then provide better results that will benefit for a larger number of institutions. Technology can touch all the aspects of life including education. In language classes, there are a lot of different places where technology can be used but in writing classes, the digital world may create a space for teachers and students to interact over e-feedback. Therefore, teachers should be made knowledgeable about educational technologies to be used for giving e-feedback and students should be made aware of how to make use of these tools to decipher teacher’s e-feedback. Just like teachers, learners may need to be taught to make use of the tools to promote learner interaction via digital contexts and this interaction can promote engagement with feedback and successful revision. By teaching to make use of different feedback tools and resources, students will be the “knowers” of how to achieve different ends. When internet is required, accessing it may pose problems. Students regard technical issues, their lack of skills or weak internet connection (Alharbi, 2019) as their main hindrances but opting for asynchronous options or combining synchronous and asynchronous tools may also give all users time and place to work on the feedback. Being able to make use of various forms of providing feedback may also increase the alternatives against such limitations. Adding multimodality will improve teacher/student collaboration leading to making more use for teacher e-feedback. Erkan, G. / Focus on ELT Journal, 2022, 4(1), Special Issue 57 Focus on ELT www.focusonelt.com In order to determine the impact of e-feedback on both learners or teachers, it might be good for such a study to be conducted with a greater number of participants from different universities so that the results could easily be generalized and would have more meaningful results for the language learning field. Interviews could be held to gain more insights from the participants. It is also vital that instructors need to be trained for giving effective and constructive feedback in the online environment in order to get valid results in such large- scale research. In addition, it would be guiding to study peer e-feedback which can be explored by making use of blogs or forums for interactive forms. For this study, the teachers made use of the LMS of the institution and basically the Turnitin to incorporate their feedback but other forms of tools, such as GoogleDocs, Blackboard and screencasts, can also be integrated to benefit from their positive effects. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated all the world that education can be transformed to an online world if needed desperately. For such times and cases, it has been learnt that all educational institutions should be equipped to be able to move to the virtual world to continue education. However, no matter what educational institutions are ready for may not be enough if the governments do not embrace the online world in their educational policy. It is highly important that the governments should strengthen their infrastructure for internet connections, maintain the already-held equipment and get the new ones ready in case they are needed. In addition, teacher training programs must also be equipped with stress management and educational technologies courses to be able to survive in the education world. It is known that the ones who can survive in the educational world will be the ones who have educational technology strength. References Ab Hamid, H., & Romly, R. (2020). Teachers’ perception on giving feedback to students’ online writing assignment during movement control order (MCO). 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